As more industries and service providers become more information reliant, a need exists to manage and access the accumulated information in an efficient and uncomplicated manner. As a result, database management systems have been established to store and track the prolific amounts of data associated with any enterprise or small scale business. Specifically, in hospitals, health care organizations, and the medical field in general, the digitization of patient information has resulted in specialized databases that allow different medical practitioners to contribute to a single digital copy of the patient file irrespective of the location of the medical practitioner. For instance, because of digitization of information, a surgeon may gain access to information regarding the patient's vitals that were entered by a nurse the previous evening.
Additionally, such digitization of patient information has successfully allowed medical practitioners to carry medical history and patient information of some or all their patients in portable electronic devices such as personal digital assistants (“PDAs”), laptop computers, or remote terminal clients. Alternatively, patient information may be wirelessly transmitted to medical practitioners' electronic devices. Digital data further allows medical practitioners to quickly share information with other medical practitioners for various purposes via electronic data transmission, such as email. Medical practitioners are now, more than ever, able to readily obtain patient information quickly and securely.
However, acquiring such information often presents various challenges due to the fact that different devices each have their own proprietary means of data representation, encapsulation, and storage. Often, the data gathering systems are provided by different vendors, and each one requires separate user login procedures and provides different navigable interfaces. For example, a heart rate monitor may create and store a graphical representation of a patient's heart rate over a period of time, and a blood pressure monitor may create and store numeric values for the patient's blood pressure over the same period of time. Therefore, the data from one device may not be readable by another device. Similarly, the data from one device may not be stored within the same database as the data of another device without first performing some form of data conversion or data manipulation.
Furthermore, a medical practitioner often must use a manual input device (e.g., a mouse, keyboard, etc.) of a computer to view and/or manipulate clinical data (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure, etc.) using an appropriate application program. Using a manual input device in such a way is cumbersome and inadequate for a medical practitioner who needs the use of his or her hands (e.g., a surgeon who has scrubbed in and is in the process of performing a surgical operation). If the medical practitioner needed to interact with the data information system during the surgical operation, the medical practitioner would have to scrub out, ask assistants for help, and/or use specially designed touch screens within the sterile surgical environment to use the manual input device in order to control the application program. Voice control technology has been used for voice transcription in report generation and to control surgical instruments such as a surgical microscope and drill, but not for control of a data information system that displays clinical data from multiple sources.
Therefore, there is a need for a voice-controlled interface that displays clinical data that is acquired data from various devices, irrespective of the format in which the data is produced. A need further exists for the voice-controlled interface to be user-customizable so that users can operate the interface without having to become familiar with a particular set of voice commands for the interface.